In 1989, an oil tanker called the Exxon Valdez struck an underwater reef in Prince William Sound, a large body of water in southern Alaska. The ship dumped about 11 million gallons of crude oil into the freezing water, creating the largest spill in U.S. h

In the video game Tetris, players try to pack as many shapes as possible into a small space. According to a new study, that’s not all they’re doing: Scientists found a connection between playing Tetris and the size of part of the brain.

I have a friend who looks just like me. We both have light brown hair that we wear pulled back, often in pigtails. We dress in the same types of sporty clothes. Our glasses have thick rims and a blue tint. We are both journalists, athletes and moms to lit

Anyone who has ever gone fishing probably knows this general rule: Keep the big ones, throw the smaller ones back. The idea behind the rule is simple — the larger fish are assumed to be older. If you were to keep the smaller ones, they would not be able t

For a pair of squirrel monkeys named Sam and Dalton, the world recently got more colorful. Male squirrel monkeys are normally red-green colorblind, which means they have trouble seeing those colors. But now, thanks to an experiment by scientists at the Un

No roads lead to Kuujjuaq. You can only get to this village, high in the Canadian Arctic, by boat or plane. The trees here are stunted and small, but the bears grow big. The 500 kids who live in Kuujjuaq (pronounced KOO-joo-ak) have unusual chores: they h

Her scientific name is Ardipithecus ramidus, and scientists call her Ardi for short. She is ancient — her bones are 4.4 million years old — and is making scientists think about the distant past in a whole new way.

People have always wondered why plants and animals are built the way they are. Charles Darwin, an Englishman who lived in the 1800s, was very curious about the shape of life forms, and did lots of experiments to find some answers. He came up with the theo

Being surrounded by sharks may sound like a bad thing, but scientists say sharks are actually a good sign of ocean health. Even knowing that, Enric Sala, a marine ecologist and National Geographic Fellow, was a little nervous when he first dived at Kingma